with this hs they still run about 47-50c under load, plenty airflow here too, 250mm fan next to the card,

jus dont wanna see your card fry,

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And thanks for the feedback

I will get around to the epoxy soon. I bought a Asus A8N32 SLI Deluxe so I can go PCI E. Will be buying either a 8800GT or 3870 when I can find one in stock. So even if I lost the card, its soon to be replaced.

i run my Card with a X2 cooler but the sticky pads on the VRM heat spreader suck and it fell off. So i've been running it without. I've had the card running at 620/730 for hours and no issues. I will eventually epoxy the heat speader but for me I've had no issues. I also have very good airflow in my case tho which helps.

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Is the VRM heatspreader the one which comes with the X2?
Or the one which came with one of the later Sapphire X1950pro revisions?

Either way you need to have tose stupid sticky pads on there.
Or get that epoxy ASAP!

I can get a used Samsung 27` for like $699 which is a very good deal. However I know my videocard won't be pushing the frame rate I require for it to be smooth. From all the reviews i've seen you need a GTX level card to really have that res comfortable for the majority of games out. I know HL2 and say Team Fortress 2 will be playable on X1950pro because they scale well with older hardware. However new games like bioshock, the new medal of honor will surely tank at that res on this card.

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sorry for slow reply, been away for a bit.

i dont actually play games, or at least if i do they are not ones that will stress the card that much, i got it for it's other abilities

i do watch a lot of movies, and find that it is very happy with 720p image files and as far as i can tell copes with 1080p ok as well, although that is a little harder on my system and it can sometimes be noticable, having said that, i have not noticed any GPU generated artifacts or daft stuff like that, and i am mor ethan happy with the card.

The X1950 is a seriously power hungry beast!
That corsair may not be up to the job of handling it well im afriad!
(and please no people jumping in telling me that they are running their 8800 cards off it fine as they do not have the same power requirements as these older cards do)

I know you think you have 40a in that power supply, but the reality is that you do not.
A multirailled unit will only supply a maxmimum of 18A per rail... this does not mean that if you have 2 rails it will supply 36A etc...
What this means, is that each rail has a limiter on it that wont allow it to exceed that amount.

I perviously had a sapphire X1950 pro... I had it on a 350W dell psu... which wouldnt even boot it up... anyways I did a lot of research on this an it was all about power.

I upgraded to an OCZ GameXstream 600W and it ran fine though I had crashes like you experiencing in the beginning.

It needed 2 molex power connectors and I plugged two in from the same rail at first. This is silly as that rail has a max of only 18A and the card needs a rail of minimum 30A.

After plugging these in from each seperate rail I was able to run perfectly stable.
Also a good power supply will run the card cooler!

try plugging in a molex from each of your two unused rails to the card... this will give it the most even power.... you say you have 3 rails... try and use the rails that do not have other peripherals plugged into it.

I have now stopped messing around and bought an Enermax Galaxy 1000W and what can I say! perfect

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I have dual rail PSU and artifacts always appear and system freezes up.
I think one of the 2 power inputs on my x1950pro is broke. I just used one molex to see if I could power up the card, one input worked the other did not.

i dont actually play games, or at least if i do they are not ones that will stress the card that much, i got it for it's other abilities

i do watch a lot of movies, and find that it is very happy with 720p image files and as far as i can tell copes with 1080p ok as well, although that is a little harder on my system and it can sometimes be noticable, having said that, i have not noticed any GPU generated artifacts or daft stuff like that, and i am mor ethan happy with the card.

only thing i will be changing is i want it water cooled

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Cool ya I figured gaming wouldn't be the primary reason for your setup. Good luck with getting it watercooled.

Sorry to bump an old topic... But I just stumbled upon this thread and you guys seem to know what you're talking about, whereas I am clueless!

I've had a x1950 Pro 512mb AGP for a little while now. Probably 7 months? Really can't remember... The manual says 'Version 2.0' on the back of it, so I assume I have the version 2.0 card.
A couple of months ago, I had a power supply blow up while playing a full screen game. It was a 550W. I then borrowed one from a friend until I could buy myself another one. After installing my friends one, it blew up within 20 minutes aswell! It was a 450W I think. So I went and bought a decent quality new 450W psu, and it seemed to be doing fine. A couple of weeks ago, during full screen applications (games basically), my computer would crash and instantly turn itself off. Occasionally my screen would become flooded with speckles (as someone in this thread has had before too).

I thought it may have been due to only a 450W power supply, so I upgraded to a 700W one, but still no difference. I have 2gb system RAM, but I must admit, it is cheap RAM that I bought off ebay... I've run a Windows Memory Diagnostic test on it, and it returned no errors. I have ordered some much nicer ram, although I doubt that has much to do with my issue..

I have submitted a support ticket with AMD/ATI, but I thought I'd ask here anyway, as they never give any technical details back.

i had an antec neo 500 die on me within aprox 3 weeks of putting the card in, that was i think the 5v rail dying, which might be unrelated, but i swapped it out for a corsair 620, and have had no issues since.

BUT, i cant stress enough the requirement for a GOOD PSU, in any PC, let alone one with one of these cards, they are thirsty beasts at times, look carefully at the 12v rail distribution and current available, total wattage is not the "be all and end all" of a PSU capabilities

My basic advice right now would be to get a PSU with a single rail 12v desgn, that is capable of delivering a decent amount of current on the 12v.....

if your looking for a recommendation, then you will not go too far wrong if you get a PC Power&Cooling unit, something like the Silencer 750 model, this will drive a decent sized system all year long without missing a beat.

So you think it would be a power supply issue? This afternoon after posting, I took my computer outside and using an air compressor, blew all the dust out of it (and I've never seen so much dust in my life!). It's now running with the side of the case off for extra ventilation, and I haven't had a crash since then, and I've been running games flat out since then... Looking in the Catalyst Control Centre, before blowing it out and taking the side off, the graphcis card was running at around 55-60 degrees Celsius (which seems like a lot!) just sitting on the desktop doing nothing special. Afterwards, it was running at about 40 degrees celsius on the desktop and 55-65 degrees while in a graphics intensive game, with quality turned up high... I'm surprised it has made that much difference.

it "could be" a PSU issue, but as you found from experience, layers of dust is bad for temps, and when temps go up, all electronics will behave differently, you could simply have killed the first PSU with dust inhalation, followed by intensive use, hard to say, i'd guess the second PSU was probably not enough in the specs somewhere, but it too would be a guess

you can not underestimate how important a stable and clean source of power is in a pc.

the one you have ordered i cant say much about, because there is no makers details for me to research (that i saw)

but... what i did see was this bit

Complies with ATX 12V 2.0 version

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this means that each 12v can NOT have more than 18amps (i think) available to it, this is a supposed safety feature, and something that a number of makers disagree with, and thus dont follow, because some graphics cards require more than that on a single rail.

you might be ok, but if it goes again, i'd just go and buy the best one you can, even if it's overkill, it will be useful when you upgrade in the future.

also have a look around your case, just to make sure your not grounding out somewhere (like motherboard to tray) or something daft like that

Alrighty, well thanks for your help! I'll check if it could be grounded out somewhere tomorrow. I highly doubt that's the case, but worth a look anyway. I really should try and understand all the electronic works of the components when I get a chance to look at it. I'm a software developer, so my knowledge of hardware is good, but can be quite simplistic, so thanks for your help.

* Ensure that Fastwrite is disabled in BIOS, and in the SMARTGART section of ATI’s Catalyst Control Center
* Try adjusting the AGP speed from (8X to 4X) (4X to 2X) or vise versa.
* Increase the AGP Aperture in the BIOS. We recommend a 128MB minimum.
* Disable any Shadowing settings in the BIOS.
* Disable any Cache Video BIOS settings in the BIOS.
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Funny how they never mentioned those specific requirements anywhere else. How is someone like me supposed to know that? I don't even understand all this talk about volts, amps and rails! If someone could quickly and simply explain that concept to me, I'd really appreciate it. Then I'd have more of an idea as to what I'm doing. Only thing I sorta understand about PSU's is wattage...

Well I had no 'shadow' setting in my BIOS, but I did have that video cache setting, so I turned it off. I'll have a search for that thread about the PSU's, thanks

EDIT: I read through the PSU stuff, and it still doesn't make much sense to me Still a bit of assumed knowledge there, of which I don't have. So to me it sounds like we think my problem is actually my power supply. I'm having trouble understanding how it could be, as it was fine for quite a few months with that old one, and the one I have now is basically no different, just with a higher wattage. There isn't anything on the card itself that could be causing the artifacts and the instant shutdowns when under pressure? I take it that it isn't a heat issue, because reading elsewhere a temperature of 65C is normal when under load, and that is what I'm getting.

Anyway, if the problem would be my power supply, could somebody maybe kick start me off by giving a couple of examples of power supplies that would work a treat? I don't want to spend a fortune... I'm not really a PC upgrading enthusiast... I just don't want it to crash!!

Just updated my system specs... It is a HIS... So what does that mean? There's nothing I can do about the artifacts at all? Does that mean ATI will replace it for me? They can't just leave it that way, surely...

I'll believe you when you say I couldn't really stuff up putting on some thermal paste... But I really don't know where to start, lol. Are you sure it will really make a difference? I mean, my temperature is perfectly fine, so I don't think working on the cooling is going to make much difference.. I have read that artifacts are probably caused by RAM on the card, and to try underclocking it... I've gotten a hold of ATI Tray Tools and have tried just that, so I'll see what happens there...

Anyway, if the problem would be my power supply, could somebody maybe kick start me off by giving a couple of examples of power supplies that would work a treat? I don't want to spend a fortune... I'm not really a PC upgrading enthusiast... I just don't want it to crash!!

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OCZ gameXstream runs my system fine, so you can assume it'll run yours too.

For a simple explanation on amps/wattages...

Power supplies arent one big wire, with all the power on it. They split off into rails internally (one for 5 volt, one for 12 volt, and one for 3.3V at least.) Modern ones have more than one rail.
a 500W PSU may have a 400W 5V rail and only 80W for the 12V - if your system uses lots of 12V power and no 5V, you're screwed!

This is why we check the amps on each rail, and make sure theres enough power there, rather than just checking the wattage.

I had a HIS X1950 Pro AGP Turbo card for about 4 weeks. I could not get any higher on drivers than 7.6. It ran fine for 4 weeks untill one day I came home from work went to my pc (in the mood to play a little bf2) Loaded up the game spawned on Wake island.. And the artifacts were bad real bad I will dig up some screen shots for you if you want. I rebooted all of the standard stuff. Removed the drivers and tried to put them back on and I couldnt get above a 4-bit desktop. I RMA it and sold the new one went to Sapphire. PCIe
This is how bad the artifacts were.

Lol this just keeps sounding worse... The card looked so good when I bought it!

I didn't realise my board was designed for DDR1 memory... How ignorant of me. I want to get a new MoBo at some stage, but I'd obviously want to upgrade, so I'd get one that supports a Socket 775 multi-core processor. Problem here is, that's going to cost a bloody lot, because I'll need the new board, and a new processor. Given, I could sell the stuff I have now for a reasonable amount. But it's still quite a financial setback. I'd get a board with PCI-e aswell, but again that means buying a new card. *sigh*